Some days ago, I wrote a rather dyspeptic post detailing my first encounter with the ideas of Leon Kass, and my continuing disgust with same. This led to a civil and pleasant exchange of views with blogger D.F. Moore, a Kass fan. Re-runs are available in chronological order here, here, here, and here. My main argument, in a nutshell, is as follows.

Point one. Leon Kass cannot win his crusade against life extension.

Point two. He might be able to slow progress down, for a while.

Point three. Such a delay would cost lives. People will die early, who need not have.

These are fairly easy conclusions to reach. The evidence is very clear and only a modest intellect is required to connect the dots.

A secondary exchange of opinions involved the morality and utility of embryonic stem cell research, and Dr. Kass’s role in attempting to shut it down.

Mr. Moore and I, as it happens, share some common ground on these issues. He, like me, considers life extension of a fairly radical sort to be more or less inevitable.
Unlike Dr. Kass, I’m guessing he sees that as a pretty good thing. He also favors embryonic stem cell research, as I do, and he does not approve of the proposed legislation to ban such research. He believes that it is not too early to begin talking about these issues.

People need to see the shape of the oncoming future, no matter how blurred the view, or they will make ill-informed plans for how best to live their lives. Really, this sort of thing is not just idle speculation. We can plainly see that many startling changes have occurred in the recent past, and it looks as though many more are still in the pipeline. Big changes are on the way and we should be bracing for what may be a rough ride. If all we had to worry about in the century ahead was homicidal fanatics, I would count us lucky. So, he and I are in agreement there too.

While I'm still feeling friendly, let me take a moment to wish Mr. Moore a belated happy birthday. Many happy returns! I didn't mean to imply that Chicago undergrads were uniquely dewy-eyed. From my perspective it's a universal collegiate constant, and not entirely a bad thing. And yes, I am mean.

Where he and I irrevocably part company is in our evaluation of Leon Kass. Mr. Moore feels that I am giving Dr. Kass short shrift as a thinker and force for good. He feels that Dr. Kass is doing the nation a valuable service, by helping to clarify our thoughts on these important matters. The country needs to have these discussions, and who better than a brilliant polymath like Leon Kass to shepherd the debate along? Well fine, I say, but I have some regrettable suspicions about the totality of the Kass agenda. For starters, I believe he is willing to stretch the truth a little when he thinks the stakes justify it. Pursuing that point would double the size of this post, so I hope to address it another day. Stay tuned.

On a more personal note, Dr. Kass wants us to die. Not Mr. Moore and I specifically, and not from any base motive. And certainly not before we have had long, productive lives. But nevertheless, he is convinced that it will be better for all concerned if we just drop dead in the ongoing fullness of time.

You know, that really doesn’t work for me. The high-minded, dispassionate moral observer role just doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t fit the facts. I don’t believe you can advocate an arbitrary and limited lifespan for people without wishing for their specific deaths as individuals. You may try to duck and weave a bit by prating about the ”natural shape” of a human life, and thus try to shift responsibility, but it will remain a logical impossibility. To advocate death as a generality is to inevitably advocate particular deaths at particular times. And if cures for a condition exist, or could be made to exist, and you do your level best to stop them, then you really can’t turn around and say it’s all part of God’s plan. Because you have crossed a line, and are attempting to act as his agent. Leon Kass has done that. His actions have gone beyond the bounds of intellectual inquiry and discourse. His position is one of advocacy, tarted up in scraps of philosophy.

Whenever a discussion of policy drifts into overly theoretical or arcane byways, I think it is helpful to ground it in a realistic scenario. The concrete and specific can be wonderful antidotes to the abstract and universal. Let’s give it a whirl.

To invert one of Dr. Kass’s less stellar arguments, how soon is it, exactly, that we should consider an individual’s death to be required by society? Can we land on a specific number? If not, then perhaps our thoughts on the subject would benefit from further refinement before we trot them out in the light of day. Let's venture the attempt.

Is death at 200 a definite social good in the Kass Canon? Clearly so. Living that long would disrupt the ties binding generations together, a delicate cycle honed over eons of evolution. How about 150? Yes, that accords well with Kassian writ. He even said so on the radio, in front of God and everyone. Anyone up for 120? Well, a few people have lived that long, but obviously they were rare and ought probably to remain so. Okay, how about a nice round century? Should most people die at 100? Well....that is still on the freakishly high side, so let’s shoot for 80 instead. Is 80 okay with everybody? No? Hey, I'm easy. We'll bump it up to 90. Better? Good. We're all happy now. We have a tentative determination.

So, now what? Beta testing, of course! Say I know a man who is 87. Still healthy, still solvent, still enjoying life. Should we kill him in 3 years? That seems extreme to me. We can’t just whack the old duffer, can we? That would be murder and, gosh, murder is wrong. Perhaps we could weasel around it though, by cutting off his medical care. That may seem a little raw, but hey, death is part of life. We all have to go sometime. It would be a natural death at least, with no blood on our hands. And that part is really important.

I may be cheating here, but the logic seems self-consistent. If longer lives represent a clear threat to our "given nature", then they should not be permitted. No, they should not be permitted at all. Society must be protected. And once we admit that long lives are bad, we need to determine how much life is too much. If we can. Sadly, for the side of pure logic, there is a potential showstopper lurking here. Dr. Kass has expressed an unyielding antipathy towards euthanasia. Houston, we have a dilemma.

On the one hand people should not live any longer than they do now, but on the other hand, they should not be killed out of hand. How to resolve this? Withholding therapy is not the solution. It might be an option in a rationing, Canadian-style environment, but here in America, people keep inventing things. Therapy will continue to gain in effectiveness while dropping in price. The light dawns.

If we can’t kill the patient outright…and we can’t withhold treatment…but the patient cannot be allowed to live past a certain date for the good of society…then we must try and stop the improvement in therapeutic effectiveness. Kill the research, not the patient. Old age will do the rest for us, and we remain guilt free. It was not our hand that slew him. We merely bound the hands that could have saved him.

That seems a bit cowardly and dishonest. If the results of a thought experiment yield nonsensical results perhaps we should re-examine our initial premises. Or junk them.

And another thing. Guiding the future course of the scientific enterprise, forever, seems unrealistic. Hubristic, even. Well, he is smarter than we, and has his own vision of the good life. Perhaps he has a hidden strategy. Perhaps it could be made to work. The Kassian vision would run something like this...

A premature death, for instance that of a child or young adult, is never to be wished for. Likewise any "untimely" death. Therefore people will be born, live through a healthy childhood and adulthood, and flourish in the strength of their middle years with as much support as the medical enterprise can ethically offer. They will spawn, nurture, educate, and then commence withering as their own children take up those mystical generational reins. After spewing out a bit of wisdom in their otium, oldsters should shrivel up, so as to make their impending demise more tolerable. And, to be sure, not to outstay their welcome.

Montaigne saw it clearly. If the prisoner is tortured and maimed sufficiently, death will seem a mercy. It’s all part of the circle of life. What rubbish. What hoary, tired, morally bankrupt rubbish.

Why is that not more apparent? Part of the problem may be that for many of the academics debating these issues, it isn't terribly real. They seem to regard it as a wonderful opportunity to engage in oneupmanship and wordplay, constructing ingenious hypotheticals, and just having a fine old time.

As I spent some time reading the Council’s report, I was struck that biologists and doctors like Gazzaniga and Blackburn came out very strongly for pressing ahead with this research. They deal with real experiments, real patients. They realize that time is passing, and is not the patient's friend. The ethicists and lawyers on the other hand , tended to have more nuanced and thoughtful positions, diving into generalities and abstractions, thought problems and caveats, all with the noble purpose of furthering understanding. There certainly was a diversity of opinion.

Actually, some of those Council scenarios were pretty good. Try this one on for size. A house is burning down, and there are children in it. In the east wing is a toddler that you just met today. In the west wing is a cryostat containing three dozen frozen blastocysts, produced using the eggs of your dead wife. You are their father. Clearly, you can’t be in two places at once. Do you go east, or west? Is it a big struggle for you?

It took me all of a tenth second to make my choice. I will not stand by and let living children burn to death. I will not, even at the cost of my own “children”. Now, you can play word games here and say that the blastocysts are living too. Yes, yes, they are or at least could become, alive. Granted. Now what’s your point, bright guy? Shall we play at being medieval scholastic logicians? Will you try and convince me that the frozen embryos stand on the same moral plane as somebody else’s toddler? That I should have run west instead of east? Don’t even try, because I won’t believe you. At the end of the day, the “real” children are the ones who need to be fed, bathed, and tucked in. The ones who scream when they burn.

Just as an afterthought, this little drama works as well with a sweet little old lady substituting for the moppet. And admittedly, the whole thing is a tad overdramatic. It’s just a thought experiment from the President's Bioethics Council, right? To the nuanced, it might seem awfully either or, mightn't it? If not accorded the same respect as a two year old, the two week old embryo deserves at least some human dignity rather than none at all. It would only be when its rights conflicted with those of an older child that we would need to make such an awful determination. Precisely.

If we were just talking about slacker scientists carving up embryos for cheap thrills, then yeah, this is an affront to human dignity. But that is the whole point. This isn't about cheap thrills. This research, this "violation of human dignity" is being done with the best of intentions, to save people’s lives. People with, you know, limbs. And a head. In an over-the-top metaphorical kind of way, lots of kids are being threatened by the flames, even now. Do we run east, or west?

Which leads me back to my three points.

Kass cannot succeed in his stated aims.

He might be able to fight a delaying action.

Said delaying action will cause needless premature deaths.

So what does he think he is doing? He isn't ignorant of this argument. Better men than I have told him much the same thing. Perhaps the Doctor feels that he can do no less. One must fight for human dignity regardless of collateral damage. Perhaps (almost certainly) he will not cede the inevitability. He believes he may yet pull it off. The Mainland Chinese beg to differ. Transpacific airfare is cheap, when measured against your life, and Charles Murray's concerns look ever more prescient.

There is a kind of hubris here, tricked out as humility. It would seem that nothing less than the future of humanity for all time is at stake here, and only a few clear sighted individuals stand between the horrors of the brave new world and our feckless, helpless descendants. I would actually prefer to leave my descendants fate in their own hands. Presumably, no, hopefully they will have a better idea of their own needs and capabilities than we do. I would also prefer to gift them with the longest, healthiest, wisest lives that we can arrange for them. If our own parents could have done it for us, they would have, and would we not be grateful for their pains?

What kind of an ancestor is it that wishes his descendants illness and death and stunted intellects? None that we should want.